The true value of these stories didn’t hit me until a few
years back when I'd finally found the perfect way to tell my mother’s stories
which I’d carried with me for years with the intent of writing them down. This
led to first a short story being published and then a novella, Tales from the Fountain Pen. You will find that about 60 to 75% of the events in those stories
are true. I’ve just woven a satisfying story around them.
After that novella was published I finally began to see these
ongoing gifts of stories I was receiving. Just by taking the time to listen to
people whose lives did not play out in the ephemeral realms of FaceBook, or
some other social media site that asks you to be a witness to every moment of
members’ lives (as if perhaps a life has less value unless it is witnessed).
Just a couple short years ago I started working on a novel,
which I now see will be a trilogy, set in Strasbourg, France, during WWII. I
contacted a friend who lives there and he very happily set out to gather
information from his octogenarian patients who frequented his medical practice.
It’s where I learned many of the little details of daily life during the occupation/annexation, which
I’ve put in the story.
But then one day I got a different email from my friend. He’d
sent me a picture of the back of an envelope with an address in Washington
State (where I lived at the time) and asked if I knew where this was, and could
I contact this person as she was the cousin of his best friend who had just
died. His purpose was two-fold. First to let her know that he had found a case
under his friend’s bed filled with pictures of her as a young child that he’d
like to return to her, and second, he wanted to get in contact to somehow
maintain a link to his best friend.
After a couple of days of solid online research and with
the help of Ancestry.com I was able to track this cousin down and learned she
lived only 10 minutes from me. I contacted her and we met for coffee. I brought my laptop and a flashdrive with all the pictures my friend had copied
and emailed to me. Within a few minutes of meeting we were fast friends and I learned of her
incredible life story, which started in 1939 in an area known at the time as Bohemia, from
there into refugee camps, on to France, and finally to be reunited with her
mother who in the 1950s had emigrated to the US with the help of an CIA agent
who’d fallen in love with her.
There are volumes I could write just from that first
encounter with my new friend, but the best gift was still to come.
My French friend
emailed to say he had found a hidden suitcase that had belonged to someone they
had assumed was his friend’s grandfather, but was in fact not … or was he?
He started sending me copies of old tintype photos and
newspaper clippings of this man of mystery. A former pilot for the
Austro-Hungarian military during WWI when he’d only been in his teens and
people flew airplanes made of canvas, wood, spit and bailing wire. Then
followed pictures showing him as a dandy, a fashionable young man about town, a
musician, an actor, a tailor. A dashing figure of mystery.
But the final pieces that kept Karl Feix in my mind all
these years were copies of a series of travel documents all issued in 1939 but
at different locations in Germany, each listing his occupation as something
different, and each giving permission to visit a different country.
There was also a copy of part of a letter he wrote to
someone who might have been a lover, but she left for New York in search of a
rich husband, and to get out of Germany as the Nazis were rising to power. Who
was she and how did she fit into the story?
But more intriguingly … how did a man who appeared most likely to be a spy of some sort between the wars, come to be the surrogate
father for my new Seattle friend? He helped her grandmother raise her in France
after he arranged for them to get refugee status there. He was not related to
them nor was he in any kind of relationship with my friend’s grandmother – who was
at least 30 years older than him.
These intertwined stories and mysteries continue to haunt me as I search
for information and the means to deeply research and write them … Ideally as a
satisfying fictionalization, though even as pure biography their stories would make
for compelling reading.
